Screening mainly concerned for children under 16, including the “volume of testing” weekly tripled “with back to school”.
Le Monde with AFP
The numbers climb, week after week. Nearly 12 million CVIV-19 screening tests were conducted week from 3 to 9 January, according to figures published Thursday, January 13 by the Ministry of Health.
The Omicron variant triggered an influx in pharmacies and laboratories: exactly 11.96 million PCR and antigenic tests were validated the return week, compared with 8.31 million the previous week, specifies the DREES (direction research, studies, evaluation and statistics), in a statement.
A 44% jump, accompanied by a new daily peak of 2.16 million tests on January 6th.
Three times more tests for less than 16 years
In rising in all age classes, the screening mainly concerned the under 16, whose “volume of tests” weekly increased from 1 million to 3 million “with the start of the school year”.
This influx weighs on “validation times [which] continue to increase”: 93% of the results are still rendered in less than twenty-four hours, thanks to two-thirds of rapid antigenic tests, but only 78% of the PCR carried out in laboratories.
The DREES recalls, however, that this slowdown could be “biased” by the congestion of the SI-DEP computer platform, confronted with “difficulties in integrating the very many tests”.